Bibi Aisha, the Afghan girl whose nose and ears were cut off by her husband, was a “lucky victim” because she survived her attack and got help, a top human rights official in the country said on Thursday.
While Aisha escaped her abusive family, the deputy chairman of the country’s Independent Human Rights Commission said many women in similar circumstances were less lucky.
“For sure, we have hundreds of Bibi Aishas in Afghanistan,” Ahmad Fahim Hakim said.
His remarks came after the news that one of the men responsible for attacking Aisha had been arrested, a development hailed by human rights workers as a sign the Afghan authorities are starting to take deep-rooted abuse of women seriously.
Hakim was speaking during the publication of a major UN report that showed how despite improvements in women’s rights the country is still blighted by forced marriages, the giving away of infant girls to future husbands to settle disputes, honor killings and desperate women resorting to death by self-immolation.
The report by the UN’s Afghanistan mission said that such practices are problems in all communities and cause “suffering, humiliation and marginalization for millions of Afghan women and girls.”
Despite recent efforts to toughen laws designed to protect women, the government does little to combat abuses, the report said.
One long-observed tradition covered by the report is the concept of baad, where a young girl will be given in marriage to settle disputes between families.
“Many of the women told us that, instead of the murderer being punished, an innocent girl is punished and has to spend her life in slavery and subject to cruel violence,” the UN’s director of human rights in Kabul Georgette Gagnon said.
The head of Afghanistan’s only specialist burns unit is quoted as saying that forced marriages are the main reason women try to commit suicide by setting themselves on fire.
According to figures quoted in the report, in 57 percent of Afghan marriages one of the partners is younger than 16.
Meanwhile, Afghan and foreign troops freed 18 kidnapped Afghan de-miners yesterday in southeastern Khost Province, the provincial police chief said.
The group from the Kabul-based Mine Detection Centre were kidnapped on Thursday in Musa Khel District by unidentified gunmen. It was the second abduction of a mine clearing team in Afghanistan this month.
Provincial Police Chief Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai said the abductors fled when the de-miners were freed and there were no casualties on either side.
As the sun sets on another scorching Yangon day, the hot and bothered descend on the Myanmar city’s parks, the coolest place to spend an evening during yet another power blackout. A wave of exceptionally hot weather has blasted Southeast Asia this week, sending the mercury to 45°C and prompting thousands of schools to suspend in-person classes. Even before the chaos and conflict unleashed by the military’s 2021 coup, Myanmar’s creaky and outdated electricity grid struggled to keep fans whirling and air conditioners humming during the hot season. Now, infrastructure attacks and dwindling offshore gas reserves mean those who cannot afford expensive diesel
Does Argentine President Javier Milei communicate with a ghost dog whose death he refuses to accept? Forced to respond to questions about his mental health, the president’s office has lashed out at “disrespectful” speculation. Twice this week, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni was asked about Milei’s English Mastiff, Conan, said to have died seven years ago. Milei, 53, had Conan cloned, and today is believed to own four copies he refers to as “four-legged children.” Or is it five? In an interview with CNN this month, Milei referred to his five dogs, whose faces and names he had engraved on the presidential baton. Conan,
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other